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Name your poison

June 26 2004, 1:00am, The Times

MATTERS OF SUBSTANCE

By Griffith Edwards

Allen Lane, £16.99; 352pp

ISBN 0 713 99689 7

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“What is a drug?” somebody once asked William Paton, then Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford. He replied without hesitation: “A drug is any chemical which when injected into a laboratory animal will produce a scientific paper.”

Griffith Edwards, a pioneer in the study of addiction, quotes Paton’s joke to make the point that we are all drug users. Caffeine, alcohol and tobacco may not be drugs of abuse, but all can create dependence, handily defined by Edwards as “an altered power relationship between user and drug”.

We can take them or leave them, until quite suddenly we can’t. A drug taken for pleasure need not lead immediately to addiction. There…

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